In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the mood of fear and
anxiety has prompted many people to reevaluate their working lives.
For many, this means spending more time with their families. For
others, it means reconsidering the idea of working long hard hours
now to save up for a great retirement later. Sacrifice in the short
term may seem less attractive now that every day is more uncertain,
and more precious.
This summer in Montana, we met a group of bakers at Great
Harvest Bread Company who have been thinking about how to balance
life and business for quite some time and have come up with a
winning recipe. Pete and Laura Wakeman started the first Great
Harvest bakery in Great Falls, Montana, in 1976. Two years later,
their success led them to franchise their bakery, but in a way that
preserved their ideals: no uniforms, few rules and an emphasis on
community-building. "A lot of people think we woke up one day
and thought, 'Let's be entrepreneurs.' It wasn't
that way. We were in our twenties and out in Montana," says
Laura Wakeman. "We just thought, 'Let's figure out a
way to stay out here.'"
Today, Great Harvest Bread is a mini-empire of about 150
"feels good, tastes great" bread stores across the
country, operating under the "freedom franchise"
umbrella. That's the term the Wakemans came up with to describe
a franchise in which the rules for franchise owners are few.
Everything but the name, the daily grinding of the flour and the
sources of wheat for the bread is up to the individual owner. The
franchise contract even states, "Anything not expressly
prohibited by the language of this agreement is allowed."
Great Harvest does operate according to the basics of franchising:
Owners turn back 7 percent of gross sales to the franchise company,
which in turn provides a host of support, such as bread recipes,
baking techniques, accounting advice and store-design tips.
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One of the first tenets is the importance of music, the
"heartbeat" of the store. In the Missoula bakery, upbeat
reggae thumps from speakers as employees knead dough around a table
in the middle of the store. They work in rhythm to the music,
joking and laughing. Fresh bread turns in the oven, and new loaves
are moved up to the counter's bread board, another Great
Harvest trademark, where everyone who enters the store is offered a
free thick slice of freshly baked bread, slathered with butter and
honey if they choose.
Like all members of the Great Harvest franchise system, the
owners of the Missoula Great Harvest bakery, Dave Scheel and Linda
Tawney, live by the mission statement of Great Harvest Bread,
written by the Wakemans: "Be loose and have fun. Bake
phenomenal bread. Run fast to help customers. Create strong,
exciting bakeries. And give generously to others." As Scheel
puts it, "If we decide one day that we want to become a pizza
store, because that's more fun, then that's what we'll
do."
Tom McMakin, former COO of Great Harvest Franchising, is hoping
to spread the ideas behind the company through his book, Bread and Butter: What a Bunch of Bakers Taught
Me about Business and Happiness. "People laugh when
they hear that title, because you don't often hear business and
happiness in the same sentence. It's almost an oxymoron,"
says McMakin, who himself moved to Montana almost a decade ago with
his wife, Mary, in search of a better life. "We're very
mindful of the fact that business is not an end in itself. It's
a means to create a happier life.
"It's a very different lesson than the dotcom ethos
that says work like heck, cash out and then move to Montana. Here
you have [Missoula store owners] Dave and Linda. They went ahead
and moved to Montana first. They're not trying to make a
billion dollars. They said, 'Let's design a life that works
for us and have the business be part of that design.'
"
Scheel and Tawney may not be trying to make a billion dollars
from their Missoula bakery, but profits are not a dirty word at
Great Harvest. "We've always been interested in
profits," says Scheel. "Profits are what buys the things
you need to have a successful business. If you watch successful
businesses, they're the ones that have the money to make those
changes over time and keep the place looking good."
Though life may be idyllic in Dillon, Montana, Great Harvest
headquarters, it is not static. This past spring, the Wakemans sold
the franchise business after 25 years. The new president and CEO,
Mike Ferretti, was CFO for a North Carolina franchise, L'il
Dino Delis. Ferretti met the Wakemans through a friend of a friend,
who thought Ferretti, a self-confessed "numbers geek,"
should buy the business. "I kept telling him, 'Bread
company? Montana? Me? Forget it,' " he remembers. Ferretti
bought Great Harvest with a group of other investors, also from
North Carolina, who were excited about the company's
potential.
"It's a sleeping giant," says Ferretti.
"It's a culture that a lot of people dream of and a
lifestyle that other people dream of, and it's been run in this
very low-key way for years. I don't plan to change it, but my
groups and my background are a more professional background."
Ferretti would like to see the franchise opening two new stores a
month once the transition to new ownership is complete. With more
than 600 cities in the United States with a population of 50,000 or
more, Ferretti is convinced he won't run out of new markets for
a long time.
Through the terms of the loan the new owners obtained to
purchase the business, the headquarters must remain in Montana as
long as the loan is out, but Ferretti says he has no plans to move
the company, even when this requirement expires. "The whole
Montana mystique is part of who we are. A lot of Great Harvest
clones have tried to duplicate our business model but never pulled
it off," says Ferretti. "It'd be a mentally
challenged business decision to move the headquarters out of
Montana."
While Ferretti admits the freedom in the Great Harvest system
can be difficult to manage at times, he also sees strength in that
lack of structure. "I have a typical franchise
background," he says, " and in this business, everything
is virtually voluntary. So the systems we make had better be good
enough so that people actually want to use them. That's a
standard of excellence that most franchises never know."
Jane Applegate is a syndicated columnist and the author
of 201 Great Ideas for Your Small Business. For
a free copy of her "Business Owner's Check Up," send
your name and address to Check Up, P.O. Box 768, Pelham NY 10803 or
e-mail it to info@sbtv.com.
Sarah Prior contributed to this article.